+ Sponsors

Tuesday, 27 March 2012

Les Pères Spirituels

Peter Turnley with Robert and Pierrette Doisneau.(Their daughter took the picture.)

I was talking to Peter Turnley about our upcoming print sale of a selection of his Paris pictures, which starts next Sunday, and something came up I thought you might be interested in.

Like most top-level photojournalists, Peter's always felt a debt of gratitude to his professional journalistic associates—his editors at Newsweek, the people at Corbis, gallerist Agathe Gaillard, Pierre Gassmann of Picto, and mentors such as Howard Chapnick of Blackstar. But besides those important people, there are what the French call les pères spirituels—"spiritual fathers," although the term might just as easily apply to brothers or sisters or mothers. It implies seeking out a different kind of support—and a desire to belong to a deliberate tradition encompassing more than just oneself.

John Morris, a dean of photojournalists and Peter's great good friend

Starting when he was young, as a new immigrant to Paris, Peter made a deliberate effort to get to know the great photographers of the city. He found the great French master Robert Doisneau by simply looking him up in the phone book. "I didn't have any agenda," he says. "I just wanted to meet him, to be in the orbit of this guy's spirit." He ended up working as Doisneau's assistant.

One lesson Peter remembers is that Doisneau could put his hands on any of his negatives from the previous thirty years within thirty seconds, and he never went to bed before he had developed, contact printed, and captioned every roll of film he'd taken that day. (Peter thinks he would have loved the digital age.) What this meticulous organization did was to allow Doisneau's entire life's work "to breathe, to live, almost like a living organism." Work that you can't find, that you can't share, might as well be lost.

Willy Ronis with one of his most famous pictures

Other encounters were more serendipitous. In 1975, his twin brother David—also a top photojournalist, now teaching at the University of Michigan—called from New York and told him to be on the lookout for an up-and-coming photographer named Josef Koudelka. Peter had never heard the name before.

Not long after that, he was in the Jardin de Luxembourg sitting on a bench with his girlfriend and a man walked by, and Peter noticed him surreptitiously taking their picture, so he jumped up and ran after him—"Did you just take our picture?" The man seemed nervous and claimed to be a tourist, but Peter had noticed his two beautifully brassed Leicas, which were hardly tourist cameras. It was Koudelka.

Josef Koudelka

Koudelka keeps things simple. Some time later, as the two shared a meal at the offices of Magnum Paris, Josef told Peter something he always remembered. He said, "My idea of a good life is I wake up in the morning, I go out and walk, and I make three films [i.e., shoot three rolls —Ed.] a day."

"It does sound like a good life," Peter says. (Does to me too.)

With Édouard Boubat

Peter's a very intense guy—that might be an understatement—and as you hear him talk about these people you can hear his enthusiasm take wing. The man who became his best friend among these pères spirituels was Édouard Boubat. They met because Jim Hughes (who also writes for TOP from time to time) had published both their work in the same issue of 35mm Photography. The two became close friends—they met several times a week whenever Peter was in Paris, for many years. (Boubat died in 1999.)

As with many of the great photographers he knew, they seldom talked about photography. The topics of discussion always had to do with world affairs, an engagement with the issues of the day, with...well, life. These days it seems like photography consists of an endless roundel of keeping up with cameras and software. It's important to remind ourselves, at least now and then, that a lot of what's important about photography isn't about photography at all.

Agathe Gaillard

I guess the point here is that it's important to know where you come from, and whose work yours builds on. Peter used his many-decades project of Paris pictures to decompress from high-stress photojournalistic assignments, but it wasn't just that. He was eager to belong—belong to the grand tradition of the great photographers of Paris. Knowing many of them personally was a big part of that enthusiasm.

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Andrew Molitor: "Great little piece here, this is the kind of thing I love on TOP! Also, some really good portraits here. Love the one of John Morris, a classic look and a wonderful face.

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "Among the luminaries mentioned I was heartened to see the name of Howard Chapnick. Few people warrant the kind of admiration I feel for Howard and all that he did for photography, shepherding young photographers, standing firm for the value of images, working to put photography squarely in the mainstream of serious culture. He made my first book happen, shaping a mass of images into a coherent documentary, and along the way treating a very young photographer with serious consideration. And he was a supremely kind and decent man. One other thing. He headed Black Star, the photo agency. So his hobby was to bet on horses that had "Star" in their name. Pretty human."

Featured Comment by John: "One of my favorite TOP posts ever. You'll likely be back to gear tomorrow, but why not make it editorial policy to once a week address themes like this? 'Wednesday: Photography Unplugged.' The community needs it.

Featured Comment by Debbie: "Wonderful post about a wonderful human being. I gave myself the gift of a workshop in Paris with Peter last May and all I can say is in addition to all of his 'Peres Spirituels' he is now forever one of mine. His delight in sharing his knowledge and his own mentors is unique and life changing. Thank you Mike and especially thank you Peter."

Mike, Thanks for this, the Carl Weese kickstarter article and John Camp's interview with David Burnett. All are a welcome relief from the current round of camera talk - as much as we all get drawn in to it.

One comment in your Peter Turnley notes caught my eye and reminded me that David Hurn said, something to the effect that, 'Photography is not a very good interest in itself, but a very good way of communicating an interest/love of something else.' I think that thought process has the ability to free us from some of the tyranny that 'being a photographer' can bring:)

"What we put into our pictures is our whole life and our whole intellectual discourse. Everything we know and everything we have done and everything that’s in our history goes into every single picture we take."

Woah- talk about name dropping!
Doisneau, Ronis and Kertesz are three of my absolute faves, strangely I can't warm to the photos of Koudelka (or Turnley for that matter).
Tip to Doisneau fans - it's worth searching out collections of his work that were only ever published in France, often even better stuff than the well known famous shots.

Love this, but love it for it's nostalgia. This era doesn't exist any more, and people can't and don't live like this any more, and maybe never did in America.

When I talk to old photographers, the thing that strikes me is the difference between how they lived even 30 years ago and today. The time they had to accomplish what they were doing, just the pace of how they worked; and the time they had to think about what they wanted to do. Even in my life time, I remember a photographer being able to survive on a few simple jobs a month.

I met a Nat Geo photographer back in the 70's, and he said when he went to a city to take pictures, he might just walk around it for a week without a camera and look at the light at different time of day, just sit in certain areas he wanted to capture and watch the light.

Now the wolf is at the door all the time, many in the industry are working constantly and the minute they stop, the outflow of expenses just balloons. Everyone works harder, longer, and for less. There is no working "smarter". There are relative few smarter clients that would ever fund the opportunity to work like people did 30 and 40 years ago. Health insurance has sky-rocketed and can reach the proportions of rent or a mortgage, and it never stops, never stops...

I weep even for the live-ablity of the 60's compared to today, and how that allowed us to study and think and take that walk every day and shoot a couple of rolls of film...

"I weep even for the live-ability of the 60's compared to today, and how that allowed us to study and think and take that walk every day and shoot a couple of rolls of film."

We should neither over-romanticize the past nor dismiss the possibilities of the present. I think a surprising number of photographers still do live and photograph this way, especially in the film community where "instant gratification" and "immediate results" are complete non-factors. Once a photographer declares that the act of photographing is often more meaning-filled and important to him or her than the resulting photos may turn out to be, it's suddenly no problem to stretch out the process and just let the pressures and urgencies float away.

Of course, the big difference between "then" and now is that nowadays fewer people than ever actually get paid for that kind of leisurely paced photography -- no surprise, considering how many millions of photographers would love to get paid for it! "Not being paid for it" means that most of us can't live that way all day, every day -- only on weekends, on vacation days, and in the early mornings and/or evenings. But what matters is that most of us still can photograph that way if we choose to. (Obviously having a job and not having a young family helps, but those don't seem to be the factors that keep most photographers from living and working this way.)

Not getting paid for photographing has plenty of upsides, from the option of being more of a perfectionist than a pro can afford to be (see "My Take"), to a complete absence of pressure, to having total freedom to photograph whatever and however one wants without worrying about "what the photo editor is expecting back at the office."

A contemplative, relaxed-paced style of photographing -- and of life -- is certainly available to many of those who are committed enough to rearrange their priorities in order to achieve it. But truly unplugging oneself from the wired (and wireless) world -- saying no to all of the e-temptations around us -- is awfully hard.

This post brought back wonderful memories of Peter's Paris workshop last May. I would say that Peter's intensity came through from his accounts of the work required for his photos. What we felt firsthand were his enthusiasm and his quick sense of how to make each of us better photographers. We were privileged to meet and hear something of the lives of the remarkable John Morris (now, I believe, a very young 93),Agathe Gaillard, and Voja Mitrovic. To see Voja's work is to realize how great an artist he is.

I recently received Peter's "Parisians"; and this post & the intro in the book have set me to thinking about photography and life. They remind us that photography is part of the pleasures of life, to capture beauty of subject and the beauty of light. Parisians have a different attitude than us Americans. They don't wallow in a romantic view of youth like we do, but rather enjoy the pleasures wherever they can (many are small like a snapshot of a beautiful woman in a bar). We as adults can much better appreciate those pleasures that come to us whether thru photography, a good meal, etc.. Thanks for the post.